“One of the problems artists today are going to face is that life, in general, is much longer than it used to be. You don’t have artists dying of tuberculosis or alcoholism when they are thirty-five or forty and leaving very interesting works– but very limited quantities, because their lives were limited. Now, most artists will probably live like everybody else until eighty, ninety or one hundred, and if they want to produce until the end, they’ll have problems, because their productive years will be much longer. Probably then you will see the difference between the good and the less good.”

If you’re an artist who just graduated you’d better get cracking on drinking yourself to death. If you’re over forty, ugh, why are you even still alive? The first of a few choice quotes from Taschen’s book Collecting Contemporary Art.

Lafcadio Hearn, in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), sums up nicely how I feel about the place over a century later: “The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact to yourself, what you really want to buy is […]